Warhammer 40k – Page 8

Casting out Ghosts

Yes, it’s one of those “who would play so-and-so” entries…

Woke up this morning intending to have a shower, shave, put a load of washing on and get into some much needed cleaning of the apartment. All of these aims have been frustrated by the revelation that I have no water.

There’s a lot of banging coming from the apartment next door, so I suspect they’re doing bathroom renovations and have managed to switch off my water along with their own. I’m tempted to head out to the… what do you call the place where all the pipes and taps are? A tap cupboard? That’ll have to do. I’m tempted to head out to the tap cupboard and start messing around in the hopes of restoring my water while leaving theirs off, but I’d probably screw up and spray scalding steam all over the renovators – not that that’s a completely unappealing idea in my current waterless mood.

Anyway, of late I’ve been indulging in my Imperial Guard fetish (oh man, that doesn’t sound good does it :)) by reading my way through Dan Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghosts series. They’re bloody good reads (often summarised as Sharpe in space) and I’ve caught up all the way to Blood Pact, which I will commence upon as soon as Amazon gets its act together and actually delivers it.

When reading a sprawling novel series with a cast of dozens I generally find it useful to consider who I’d cast if I had an unlimited budget to produce a movie or TV series of it. This helps me keep everyone straight in my head. I’ve done this with some of the Ghosts, and – since this is my blog, I can do what I like with it and I’ve got nothing better to do while waiting for the water to be reconnected – I thought I’d list them here.

(I should note that this list is rather strongly influenced by one that I stumbled across online, lest anyone accuse me of casting decision plagiarism. I’d link to it if I could find it again)

Colonel-Commisar Ibram Gaunt: Daniel Craig. As far as I’m concerned Daniel Craig is Gaunt, which makes the current crop of James Bond films rather odd viewing 🙂

Major Elim Rawne: Eric Bana. I think he could easily pull off the combination of charisma and menace required for Rawne.

Master Sniper Hlaine ‘Mad’ Larkin: Hugh Laurie. Not an obvious choice but I reckon Laurie would make a really impressive Larkin. Everyone thinks of him as House of course, and as far as personality goes you couldn’t get much further apart than the domineering doctor and the mentally vulnerable sniper, but Laurie is such a gifted actor that I think he could do it, and do it well. You’d just need to give him a different accent (which you’d be doing anyway) and haircut so everyone doesn’t think “House!” any time he appears on screen.

Sergeant Agun Soric: Bob Hoskins. Another casting choice that just seems to work for me. Hoskins is Soric.

Chief Scout Sergeant Oan Mkoll: Robert Carlyle. Another from the casting list that I stumbled over. At first I thought it was a ridiculous idea, as Carlyle looks nothing like the Mkoll in my head, but after watching his performance in this week’s episode of Stargate Universe I’ve reversed my opinion. He’d make a great Mkoll.

Eszrah ap Niht: Jason Momoa. Momoa seems to be the go-to-guy for big menacing dudes in sci-fi/fantasy at the moment. I can’t recall if Eszrah is meant to be particularly big, but he’s certainly menacing, which makes him seem big 🙂

Major Gol Kolea: Tahmoh Penikett. He’s probably a bit young to really be (former) family man Gol Kolea, but I reckon he’d do the job.

Ayatani Zweil: John Hurt. If he wasn’t willing to commit to an ongoing role, Hurt would also make a great Lord Militant General Noches Sturm.

Trooper Brinn Milo: Colin Morgan. Get rid of that ridiculous haircut and he’d make a great Milo.

Sanian/Saint Sabbat: Ellen Page. Now that’s a casting completely out of left field I know, but I suspect that if she could handle the role, she’d be fantastic in it. Put her on the audition list and see how she goes.

So that’s where my casting list stands at the moment. Yes, it leaves out a bunch of important characters, but I simply haven’t decided who should play them yet. I know I did have a great idea for Varl, but can’t remember who it was. So, roll on the pilot episode people! Let’s get this underway! ;D

Tropes on the Ropes

In the grim darkness of the future there are only wiki edits

TV Tropes, was there ever a a better website for losing yourself in? You start at 9:00 in the morning reading up about your favourite movie and the next time you glance at the clock it’s 11:00 at night and you realise you’ve been absent mindedly been chewing on your own arm for sustenance while reading about Brian Blessed.

(Sorry. BRIAN BLESSED!!)

For quite some time one of my (and my friends’) favourite TV Tropes pages has been the one about Warhammer 40k, which does a fantastic job of explaining exactly what the setting is all about, all the time being side-achingly hilarious. So I went to check up on it the other day…

Oh the Horror!!

What was so great about the old page was that it was hilarious, accurate and subtle. A number of ridiculously insane things were discussed in an even, meaured, calm tone, sort of like Stephen Fry lecturing you on the complete works of Stan Deyo. Now it’s like a raving lunatic (or for that matter Stan Deyo) running up and screaming in your face about the complete works of Stan Deyo. It’s informative, sure, but nowhere near as enjoyable.

Or maybe it’s like the difference between a glass of well aged scotch by the fireplace in a well stocked library versus a vodka UDL by the toilets in a high octane nightclub.

Now I tried accessing the history of the page to try and recover my preferred version of the text, but the wiki software used by TV Tropes is strange and confusing to me. So rather than engage in further faffing about I decided to use my extraordinarily powerful memory to try and reconstruct it. So, here it goes, the classic version of TV Tropes’ Warhammer 40k page…

(Well, the important bit anyway)

Thirty-eight thousand years in the future, the mighty Imperium of Man has expanded across the galaxy… to discover that the galaxy is a Hell that would make Hieronymous Bosch crap himself in terror, and it has a Hell. From without, the Imperium is besieged by innumerable hordes of alien monsters from the farthest abysses of space, soulless death-machines and nightmare daemons (as well as nightmare death-machines and soulless daemons, and the occasional nightmare daemon in a soulless death machine); from within, treachery, heresy, plain ignorance and the festering infectious taint that is Chaos threaten to rip it into uncountable pieces.

Warhammer 40,000 is not a happy place. Rather than just being Darker and Edgier, it soaks itself in light-absorbing paint, straps on a jetpack and hurls itself over the edge, screaming IN THE GRIM DARKNESS OF FAR FUTURE THERE IS ONLY WARRRRRRGH! The Imperium of Man is a totalitarian, oppressive, stark, and downright sucky place to live where, for far too many people, living isn’t something to do till you die, but something to suffer through till something comes around and kills you in an unbelievably horrible way, while torturing your soul and melting down your body for biomass – and it’s quite probably something on your own side. The Messiah has been locked up on life support for the past ten millennia, laid low by his most beloved son, and an incomprehensibly vast Church Militant commits hourly atrocities in his name.

The problem is, as bad as the Imperium is, they’re not quite as bad as many of the other factions. Death is about the best you can hope for against the vast majority of the other major players in the battlefields of the 41st Millennium. The basic premise of 40k, insofar as it can be summed up, is that of an eternal, impossibly vast conflict between a number of absurdly powerful genocidal, xenocidal, and (in one case) omnicidal factions, with every single weapon, ideology and creative piece of nastiness imaginable turned up to eleven. The 40k universe is a spectacularly brutal playground of tropes and horrible things taken to their absolute extreme, and in some cases, beyond. Entire planets with populations of billions are lost due to rounding errors in tax returns. Orders a million strong of capricious, fanatical, genetically engineered Super Soldier Knights Templar serve as the Imperium’s special forces, while the trillions of soldiers in its regular armies take disregard for human life to new and interesting extremes. A futuristic space Inquisition ruthlessly hunts down anyone with even a hint of the taint of the heretic, the mutant, or the alien, and is backed up by legions of psychic daemonhunting elite super-soldiers and fanatical pyromaniac power-armoured battle nuns. The standard-issue sidearm of a Space Marine is a fully automatic armour-piercing rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The Astronomican, a navigation aid has the souls of thousands of psychic humans sacrificed to it every day, dying to feed the machine. The faster than light travel used by most factions carries with it a good chance of being eaten by daemons. The ancient and mysterious manipulator-race contrive wars that see billions dead so that small handfuls of their own may survive, while their depraved cousins literally cannot endure the agony of a life not spent torturing numberless innocents to death in ingeniously horrific ways. There are several vast Bug Swarms trying to eat every organic thing in the galaxy, light-years-wide holes in reality through which countless daemons and corrupted daemon-powered super-soldiers periodically attempt to destroy the universe, and an entire civilization of undying omnicidal maniacs serving their star-god masters’ desire to exterminate all living creatures, down to the last bacterium. There’s a genetically-engineered survivor warrior species infesting every corner of the galaxy and cheerfully trying to kill everything (including each other if nothing better presents itself) because it’s literally hard-wired into their genetic code to do so and because it’s fun. The closest thing to the “good guys” you can find in this setting is a tiny alien empire sandwiched between all the other factions – and they may or may not have a thing for forcing new subjects into their empire through orbital bombardment and concentration camps, but at least they’ll offer you admittance into their club. Everywhere there are chainsaw swords, BFG’s, armored gloves that crush tanks, mountain-sized daemonic walking battle cathedrals, tanks the size of city blocks and warships that level continents, if not simply obliterating all life on an entire planet just to be sure. And sometimes even that doesn’t work. There is no time for peace, no respite, no forgiveness; there is only war.

There. that’s much better!

(The version of the Warhammer 40,000 text above is of course licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. In other words it came from TV Tropes and you can do what you like with it as long as you let everyone else do the same.)

I am a Kraken from the Sea!

I heard that was you…

Saw two movies yesterday. Well, one and maybe a third of another.

After about a month’s break due to Fabes’s commitments regarding the Dockers and his son we got back to work on the infamous 40k boards again. They are now all sealed, and one has had the magnets installed (they’re actually looking really good now). As is usually the case whenever we get together to work on a project however we realised halfway through that we’d shot ourselves in the feet – installing the magnets on the boards has to be done sequentially and it takes about 24 hours for the araldite we’re using to fix them to cure. Result – an entire afternoon with nothing to do but watch glue dry.

So we put on the TV instead and mercilessly mocked whatever we came across as we channel surfed. We eventually stumbled onto 1972’s What’s Up Doc? and ended up seeing some quite large chunks of it.

The bits we saw weren’t bad. I mean, they weren’t fantastically amusing, but they were OK for a slow Saturday afternoon. And it’s downright startling to realise that back in the day Barbara Streisand was pretty damn cute.

Anyway, eventually I got home, watched the new episode of Dr Who (my opinion on it is in a holding pattern until part two airs next week), then settled down to watch Juno – a film that I thought I’d like back when it came out, but never got around to seeing.

As it turns out I was right, it was a lot of fun (for some reason Ellen Page pretending to be a Kraken is one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen). And it didn’t feel at all preachy – any movie about teen pregnancy runs the risk of turning into some kind of after school special but to me Juno managed just to be a bunch of stuff that happens without any kind of big moral or message. Good, fun, quirky entertainment with characters that you can care about. And krakens.

In my own life my kitchen is now startlingly clean and organised. This is good because I’ve been fighting a bit of a war with cockroaches for a while and it looks like I’ve broken the back of their offensive. Either that or the roach bombs I’ve put up on the window-sill in preparation for fumigating the entire apartment have scared them off. Today I’m starting on the bathroom, which will be a whole world of fun, but at least won’t take as long as the kitchen did.

(Note to cold climate dwelling foreigners who may be reeling in disgust at my arthropod related revelations. In a sub-tropical climate cockroaches are always present. In cold and temperate zones having roaches may be a sign of complete hygienic depravity, but in these warmer parts of the world it’s not a matter of having no cockroaches, it’s a matter of knowing they’re around but keeping numbers down so you only see them when the weather goes all pre-Cambrian and they think they’re running the planet again and can go roaming with impunity. So having a roach problem doesn’t mean I’ve turned into a ragged-haired, garbage-hoarding, slum dweller, it just means I haven’t done the washing up as often as I should :))

Well, back to it.

A Universe Built on Bad Puns

For Tanith! For Verghast! For cold and flu relief!

In the next Gaunt’s Ghosts novel Dan Abnett should have the Ghosts face a Chaos cult called the Histi.

That way they could fight them with anti-Histi-mines!

(Yes, yes, I’ll go drive over my head with a chimera now…)

Crates

As if the rules aren’t complicated enough already…

I’m currently building a large terrain piece for Fabes’ and my Warhammer 40,000 games – an Adeptus Mechanicus/Imperial Navy hanger building. The plan is to have battles around the hanger, but also inside the hanger, which will include fights in the main hanger space, involving lots of action movie style firefights between rows of crates.

Now 40k has a pretty simple rule about cover – units in cover get a 4+ save. This is well and good, but misses some of the strategy and fun of fighting in a warehouse environment full of barrels, crates and explosive gas canisters. So, Fabes and I have come up with the following rules to make crate rich environments a bit more exciting…

CRATE TYPES
Crates can be divided into four types. Large Metal Crates, Large Wooden Crates, Small Crates, and Barrels/Cannisters/Ammo Boxes. Each piece of Crate terrain should be designated as one of these types.

CRATE COVER
The four types of Crates provide cover saves for models behind them as follows…

Large Metal            4+
Large Wooden       5+
Small or Barrel/Cannister/Ammo Box      6+

Cover for a barricade of crates is calculated by taking the highest cover save of all the crates in the structure. A barricade containing a Large Metal Crate for instance starts with 4+, while one with no Large Metal but Large Wooden starts at 5+. Every additional crate in the structure adds +1 to the save, to a maximum of 2+.

ATTACKING CRATES
A unit may elect to fire on a crate, or a barricade as if it is another unit. The Armour Values of crates are as follows…

Large Metal           8
Large Wooden      6
Small or Barrel/Cannister/Ammo Box      4

When firing on a barricade the attacker may designate which succesful hits impact on which crate (all hits must be allocated before resolving them).

RESOLVING HITS
When a crate is hit, roll 2d6 on the Crate Impact Table. Each type of crate gets a modifier for this table as follows…

Large Metal           0
Large Wooden    +2
Small                    +2
Ammo Box/Barrel/Canister +4

Using a flamer, melta or plasma weapon gives an additional +1

CRATE IMPACT TABLE (2d6)

2,3,4,5 – No Effect
6,7,8,9 – If a large crate, replace with a small crate, otherwise no effect
10,11,12 – Destroyed

If a natural double 1 or double 6 is rolled, the crate explodes with a Strength of 3, an AP of 5 and the standard blast template.

So yeah, there we go. Have fun kids!

A Musical Cornucopia

Doing what every sane person did years ago

Caught up with Fabes and Juan over the weekend. We got the last of the boards flocked and had a quick scratch-up game of 40k. Fabes totally kicked my arse again – this time in two rounds – but that’s cool because I wasn’t actually trying to win. I was actually using the game to test some different strategies and gathered some very interesting data for further consideration…

(Fabes may think I’m just saying that after the fact to excuse my execrable performance, but I said as much to Juan before the game began, so there! :))

I’ve also started work on another project. While hanging around at Fabes’ place it occurred to me that I haven’t actually sat down and listened to a CD in ages. In years in fact. I listen to plenty of music, but it’s all via iTunes on my computer. I’ve got a couple of two metre tall IKEA racks full of CDs that I never touch, and I desperately need somewhere to store all the 40k models I’ve been buying. The solution is obvious – pack all the CDs up in a cupboard somewhere, and use the racks to hold my army. Brilliant!

So how is that a project you ask? It’s simple, I’ve got to go through and rip all the CDs before I put them away.

You see, I’ve never properly ripped most of them. When I first started listening to music on my computer I was cursed with a small hard drive, and a highly tempermental CD drive, which meant I could only afford to rip the songs I really liked at comparatively low quality to save space – and I usually had to rip them multiple times to get versions without annoying drop outs. In the end about 10% of my music collection actually ended up on my computer.

But now I have a huge hard drive and a CD/DVD drive that reliably rips tracks at close to the speed of light (or so it seems compared to my old machine). So I’m going to go through every single CD I own and get it ripped, imported and organised at high quality. It’ll be a marvellous cornucopia of music! And I’ll have somewhere to keep my Valhallans. Everybody wins!

Yeah, that’s really all I’ve got to say 🙂

(Watch this)

Strip!

Simple Green and Simple Green! What is Simple Green?!

Among the models that I’ve been buying off eBay for my Valhallans was a rather interesting plastic one that came as part of a job lot. I can’t tell exactly what it’s meant to be, but it looks like a bald guy with cables coming out the back of his head, wielding what appears to be a plasma gun. There’s a large aquilla on his chest and he’s carrying some kind of ammo or power box.

Any further attempt at identification has been hampered by a bad repainting job – rather than strip off the previous paint a new coat of black primer has been sprayed over the top, rendering all detail lumpy and indistinct. There’s no way I was going to let this stand, so I did some research into paint stripping on plastic models.

Stripping paint off metal models is no problem – I’ve been using nail polish remover (acetone) for that with great success. Plastics are another matter entirely however, as any chemical strong enough to melt paint will usually melt plastics as well, so one needs to be very careful and run some tests. Or go to the internet which is of course what I did.

Searching for stripping info online was (as is normally the case) both enlightening and frustrating in equal parts. It appears that the gold standard for stripping plastics is a mysterious product called “simple green”. Americans seem to swear by it, and then refuse to listen when people point out that they don’t live in the States and therefore can’t obtain it…

Non-American: What can I use to strip plastics?
American: Use Simple Green! It’s awesome!
Non-American: What the hell is Simple Green?
American: It’s the best thing ever! Use Simple Green!
Non-American: I can’t get Simple Green where I live, what else can I use?
American: Simple Green! You can get it at your local Walmart!
Non-American: I live in [Country], is there something else I can use?
American: I don’t understand why you don’t just use Simple Green!
Non-American: I can’t get Simple Green!!
America: Simple Green!

…and so on.

Second rank suggestions include a variety of unpleasant substances such as turpentine, methylated spirits, oven cleaner and acne cream – all with provisos that they might melt the plastic anyway, so you should just be sensible and use Simple Green. But there was one suggestion that caught my eye – Dettol. I have some Dettol, so I thought I’d give it a crack.

Two days of soaking bits of sprue in Dettol resulted in no melting or other damage, so it passed the first hurdle. That tested I felt confident enough to dump the model in the stuff, so left it in overnight.

So the results – Dettol does in fact melt paint without damaging the underlying plastic. Hooray!

The downside – Dettol turns the paint into a highly adhesive, sticky mush, kind of like what you’d get if you mixed shoe polish and superglue. It sticks like crazy to the model, and to your hands, and to anything else you touch while frantically trying to get if off said hands. My bathroom taps now look like I’ve been enthusiastically smearing them with Kiwi, and my fingernails look like Marilyn Manson’s. It seems that the only way to shift this shoggoth-like material is with more Dettol, so my bathroom and hands now smell like the intensive care ward down at the hospital. But at least the paint is coming off!

I’ve left the model in to soak again while I’m at work. Maybe tonight I’ll be able to finish the job without ending up looking like a Hey Hey it’s Saturday sketch.

Running

How to annoy the Customs department and Cyberpunk fans

Long weekend! Hooray!

(Yes, I usually take every second Monday off, so I get plenty of long weekends, but this is one I get paid for :))

Been spending much of my spare time messing around with Warhammer 40k models – the sad, nerdy results can be seen in my Flickr Stream. The boards that Fabes and I have been building are starting to actually look good, and my force of Valhallan Imperial Guard now consists mostly of models rather than paper cut outs. Still a long way to go though – for one thing I’ll have to paint them all.

Here’s a thing – if you’re going to post gaming materials to Australia, do not put “Warhammer Parts” on the declaration form unless you want customs to open it up and make sure you’re not sending someone prohibited medieval weaponry 😀

Oh, and here’s another thing – a promotional video FASA made for their Cyberpunk/Fantasy fusion game Shadowrun back in 1990.

Problems…

No one ever moves like that in real life. If you want to be stealthy you move in discrete jumps from shadow to shadow or cover to cover. You don’t skip down street wagging your head back and forth like a caffeinated hamster.

When you’re making a movie your first budgetary consideration should be hiring actors who can actually act. Costumes, pink spotlights, hairspray and fog machines can come later.

If you come around a corner and spot a guard, what do you do?
a) Retreat back around the corner and discuss your options
b) Stand out in the open, right under a spotlight, and yell at each other.
(Hint – if you chose anything other than “a” you’re doing it wrong)

The whole video reeks of preaching to the converted. If you have no idea of what Shadowrun is, you would be left feeling confused (and annoyed). Where are the cybernetics? Where are the meta-humans? Why doesn’t that guy put on a goddamn shirt?

So, magic requires your shoulders to be exposed, and causes temporary paralysis. Good to know.

I know Netrunners (or whatever they’re called in Shadownrun, my pedigree is Cyberpunk 2020 after all) aren’t meant to be the muscle of the team, but those panels didn’t seem to require a muscle bound freak to open them.

Oo! It’s a cheap-ass TARDIS control room! And netrunning decks look just like chunky 1980’s keyboards. Retro cool!

If you don’t want the future to laugh at you, don’t blow your entire budget (and half your runtime) on computer graphics that are going to look ludicrous in five years time. And if you are going to whack in a bunch of computer graphics at least include some kind of narrative so people can tell that they’re part of the story and someone didn’t just tape over the movie with an MTV clip.

So, intrusion programs are designed by the Tall Man? Neat.

OK, that’s about all I’ve got to say. Go and make your own entertainment.

Signs You’ve Been Reading Too Much 40k…

No such thing!

1: You find yourself saying “feth” all the time.

2: You read an article about bikie gangs and keep reading “Police Commissioner” as “Police Commissar”

3: You see a bright yellow car and think it must belong to the Imperial Fists.

I’ve read six Gaunt’s Ghosts novels in the last two weeks, and am halfway through a seventh. I’ve done all of the above. Maybe I should take a break…

Foolish 40k Ideas Number One – Servo Skulls

Skeletons. And Fire. And skeletons on fire.

If your Imperial Guard force includes an Techpriest Enginseer you may take up to three Servo Skulls at a cost of 30 points each.

	WS	BS	S	T	W	I	A	Ld	Sv
Servo Skull	4	–	3	4	1	5	1	–	–

A Servo Skull moves as an independent model with a movement of 12″, following the skimmer rules. It may move in and out of cover without penalty and has the Scouts special rule. Servo Skulls count as HQ units and may not claim objectives. They may not join up with other units.

A Servo Skull carries no weapons and cannot fire or assault. It never has to take leadership checks, and in any circumstance where a leadership check would be required is assumed to have automatically passed.

If attacked in an assault a Servo Skull fights as normal, but any wounds it inflicts are ignored apart from for purposes of combat resolution. If victorious in a combat it may disengage and move up to 6″ in any direction at the end of the assault phase.

A Servo Skull is so delicate that it has no Armour Save, and can never receive one. However its small size and high speed grant it a permanent 5+ Cover Save, even when completely in the open.

Destroying a Servo Skull scores no victory points, however if all Techpriests in the force are removed as a casualties, all Servo Skulls are also removed. If all Techpriests are in reserve, all Servo Skulls must also be in reserve.

If a scattering weapon is targeted at a point within 6″ of a friendly Servo Skull, it rolls one less die for scatter. Being in range of multiple Servo Skulls has no additional effect.

So, that will either add some interesting strategic choices to the game, or break it entirely. Have fun kids! 🙂